The present invention relates to an electronic mail system for electronically delivering information to a communicating partner, and in particular, to an electronic mail system for delivering output data produced from a business processing system.
In firms and companies, business processing systems are employed to carry out business jobs, for example, for effecting daily, weekly, or monthly jobs such that a daily, weekly, or monthly report is periodically outputted from the computer system. The report thus outputted is temporarily stored as output data in an auxiliary storage so as to be printed out by use of a high-speed printer. The printed matter is then delivered from an electronic data processing (EDP) section to divisions and sections requiring the printed matter.
In such a division, based on the data of the delivered report, various jobs are conducted to produce data for the decision making, to analyze the data, or to generate other reports. For these purposes, it is necessary to input again the data in a data processing equipment such as a personal computer dedicatedly used in the division.
However, the conventional method above is attended with the following problems.
That is, there is required human work when the output data generated from the business processing system is to be delivered to the divisions and sections requiring the data and when the delivered data is to be inputted again for the processing and analysis thereof. In addition, when a great amount of output data is delivered in a form of printed matter, a large space is required for the storage and accumulation thereof; furthermore, a long period of time is necessary to retrieve data thus stored.
As described above, according to this method, a considerable period of time is required to re-input the data and there exists a chance of a mis-input, which leads to problems that the reliability of the result of the data processing and analysis is lowered and the decision making results in an error or is delayed.
On the other hand, there has been described in the JP-A-57-131148 a system in which data created by a terminal in a time-sharing system (TSS) by use of a host computer is transferred to another terminal specified so as to deliver the data without producing the printed matter thereof.
In this system, however, the terminal to which the data is transferred is required to be specified when the data is created. Consequently, in a case where output data periodically produced is to be transferred to terminals, the terminal as the transfer destination is required to be specified through an operator for each data transfer, which deteriorates the efficiency of data delivery.